A term which describes a system that deals correctly with extended character sets which (unlike ASCII) use all eight Bits of a byte. Many programs and communications systems assume that all characters have codes in the range 0 to 127. This leaves the top Bit of each byte free for use as a parityBit or some kind of flag Bit. These assumptions break down when the program is used in some non-english-speaking countries with larger alphabets. If a binary file is transmitted via a communications link which is not eight-Bit clean, it will be corrupted. To combat this you can encode it with uuencode which uses only ASCII characters. There are some links however which are not even "seven-Bit clean" and cause problems even for uuencoded data. (1995-01-05)